That is a legit way of working on contribution. You fork, you work on the fork - if it's not junk then you issue a pull request. What's the deal with belittling and holier-than-thou moralizing?
I have nothing against forking ofc. I like it. But I really don’t like laziness when there is no contribution to original project - instead those codies make the project as their, in fact it is just a (poor) fork. The result is the mess. My first comment was about this behaviour.
Forking is nice when it’s nice.